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Forced their hand? Last time I checked, they are: 1) still operating the program, and 2) tenaciously defending it.

For shame!

As far as I know, they are still allowed to operate the program under the law. Hopefully, in June (or whenever the 215 provisions expire) they will no longer be legally allowed to operate. Then it'll probably cease to exist.

That being said, it seems weird that the top level administrators of the NSA have been bold face lying to congressional committees under oath and no-one in the Justice Department is interested in prosecuting them for perjury.... As far as I understand, that is a legitimate crime.

I hate to burst your bubble, but every example of component based programming that I've seen uses managers to access and control the individual components. You cannot use components otherwise. (At least, not in a memory restricted environment like a video game)

If you have ever worked on a large video games, then you know exactly what I am talking about.

You seem to forget that getting the warrant is only the first step in the legal process. Next the actual surveillance (aka hacking) needs to be done and then the evidence needs to be presented in court in public. All of that requires time and energy. This is a heck of a lot better then the warrantless mass surveillance done by the NSA and company

IMHO, This is why warrant-based legal keyloggers and hacking will most likely become the norm and legally accepted.It gets rid of the need for mass survillance and trying to prevent mass encryption...It will require the cops to get wise on how to hack though...

Now I'm starting to think that the whole NSA spying thing, and government spying in general, is a direct result of the lack of physical control of the populace. In principal, people in the free countries can think what they want, but only if the government knows what people are thinking at all times. I guess monitoring everyone's thoughts like as if we were all prisoners on parole is a direct consequence of physical freedom. If people are granted the freedom to _do_ what they like, they must give up the right to _think_ what they like, or at least they give up the right to share their thoughts privately with others.

There's definitely a balance that needs to be maintained here. Privacy and freedom of speech are almost opposites of each other...

The right of Freedom of Speech demands that we publicly air our grivances and are protected when we do so. We have to exercise this right from time to time just to make sure that it isn't forgotten.

The right to Privacy means that we are allowed to keep certain parts of our lives private and that the law protects this.

We have mostly gone towards Freedom of Speech over Privacy.Consider a court case: an examining lawyer is allowed to ask you ANYTHING and unless it is very unrelated to the case at hand, you have to answer truthfully or face a purgery charge. No privacy there...

So what I am trying to say is: Worrying about the government monitoring your thoughts is probably not such a big problem unless they are used to imprison you.I'd worry more about requirements to keep my thoughts private....

>> “The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn’t follow up on it, the public’s going to demand answers,” he said.

That quote seems to be pretty far-fetched because if a law enforcement agency (most likely the FBI) really needed to follow up on a lead,they could always do it the hard way: get a warrent and hack into the suspect's computer and plant a bug. That includes breaking into his house and putting in a physical key logger. But that would actually require effort...

I think the whole debate about encryption and public monitoring is totally overblown.The government should get used to the fact that encryption isn't going away and that total surveillance is overkill andthe American public should get used to the fact that law enforcement is going to be able to get warrants to break into their homes and computers todo monitoring.

I think that both sides on this debate have been approaching the issue of security vs freedom of speech+privacy rights in far to lazy a manner.

This reminds me of the time back in 2003 when I was working for a company developing an online casino.The company ran on a complete MS stack and I was violently terrified of having to code in VisualBasic on IIS.

So I was completely overjoyed and excited to learn that IIS also supported MS javascript as well.So I wrote all of the backend code in JS with all of it's prototyping goodness.Of course MS javascript had lots of problems with the core prototypes (like string) not being extendable but I worked around that.I followed Douglas Crockford postings with a religious fervor back then because he was the goto source for decent JS coding syntax.Most everything he wrote worked on both IE6.0 and mozilla.

Of course I left the company (I found a much better job) but after a couple of years, they wanted me back as a consultant to help port the backend over to C#.JS was too confusing for the new developers!!

Personally, I think what Branden Eich did with JS was brillant and very advanced.

There would be a new growth industry based on people paying to retrieve old issues of newspapers, songs, movies, etc.Currently there's a large barrier for small-time archivists because if they sell someone access to a newspaper article, they have to make sure the copyright is legit.

If we reduced copyright to a much shorter time, people would be able to take multimedia and remix it and reuse it in a broader manner

Ladyada, if you are listening, please please please release a kit for a full RGB SpokePOV. The monochome version is awesome so an RGB version would be 3x better!! heh

also, instead of having separate magnetic sensor for each spoke, it would be easier to have one sensor and wire the spokes together so they are guaranteed to be synchronized.I guess the design would have to change so the user has to program in the angle between the spokes.